The Novel Of Freakonomics Written By Steven D. Levitt Essay

The Novel Of Freakonomics Written By Steven D. Levitt Essay

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Chapter 1: In the novel of Freakonomics written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, it clearly shows how economic incentives in our society would make a usual honest person decide to commit the act of cheating. If that person comes across the thought of cheating, it usually is for a personal well being. By that I mean they are obviously doing it for an important reason because normally they would never think about committing an act that is morally wrong. The two groups in the chapter that I feel have the most similar qualities were the teachers and the sumo wrestlers. They can stand and talk for hours on the subject they love, but it 's been proven that they cheat. Who do you ask? Teachers. According to the novel "An analysis of the entire Chicago data reveals evidence of teacher cheating in more than 200 classrooms per year" (Levitt & Dubner 32). Teachers just like students have incentives to cheat, I mean we all are human and it is apart of our nature. The main incentives are: fear of termination due to low test scores, better appraisal, and higher paychecks. These incentives I feel do not succeed for the teachers because of future problems for the students. If a teacher changes an answer for a student who answered incorrectly, what good is that for the student moving on to the next grade? The student is moving on with false thoughts in their brain to the next level which can affect them highly at that subject. In addition the big men who fight for dominance are just at fault with the teachers for cheating. The sport is primarily based on honor, but that 's just a stretch of the truth in reality. The main focus in sumo wrestling is that "each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice if his life" (Levitt & Dub...

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...fferent birth certificates. The certificates display the name of not only the child, but the parent as well. Interestingly enough they also showed the zip code. From looking at the zip code a person can look at the living environment around them. For example a poor, well populated African American community will have different names rather than a rich white community. In this study, I as reader do not agree with this study. Once again correlation does not show causation. A man by the name of Andrew grew up in the poorest area of Chicago, but grew up to be a millionaire by playing Major League Baseball. The naming of a child doesn 't not determine the outcome of their life. Both my father, stepmother, and brothers names appear in different lists. I personally do not think this means anything, everybody grows up into something and a name will not determine this outcome.

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- "Anybody living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin... The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly - a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile... Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace, So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery, and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome and constant companion...... [tags: Steven Levitt]